You're listening to season six of the recovery happy hour podcast.

Are you ready? Hold on to your headphones. Let's do this.

Hi, everyone. Welcome to recovery happy hour where we talk about life beyond the bottle.

And what happens after we stop drinking? I'm your host Trisha and sometimes I record this show

sitting at a 30-year-old folding card table that I also use as my dining room table. Thank you

for joining me. On today's episode, we've got an interview with an artist. So I wanted to spend the

introduction talking about why creativity could be important to your recovery. Injouli is interview

we briefly talked about the relationship between grief and creativity. And I mentioned something that I

heard Brené Brown say on a podcast a long time ago. So I went and found the actual quote from her.

It says, I used to believe that there were creative people and there were non-creative people.

And now I absolutely understand personally and professionally from the data that there are no

such thing as non-creative people. There are just people who use their creativity and people who

don't. Unused creativity is not benign. It metastasizes. It turns into grief, rage, judgment,

sorrow, and shame. Metastasizes is a verb that's usually used when talking about cancer. It means

to spread like cancer spreads. So I want to talk about grief and creativity separately in this intro

and then together. Grief is omnipresent in your life whether you want to acknowledge it or not,

okay? It is everywhere. It's part of most processes. Grief is usually involved in most sorts of pain

or heartbreak and we've all been through pain, right? Maybe that's what you're drinking to numb.

You know, your sadness about something and numbing it prevents you from feeling it. And if you don't

feel it, you won't have to process it, right? And that's all fine and well until it's not. Before you

know it, the grief begins bubbling up over the surface and you're having little meltdowns all the

time and you can't figure out why. And then you're drinking a bottle or two of wine every night and

...